terryR's Favorites

I guess my definition of “Soon” is somewhat lax lol I had mentioned before (5 months ago, in this blog post I had taken some extra pictures and I would do a follow up on how I set up the various skates of the #55 to make the molding profile I had been testing out.
So this is the profile I had been using:
There are up to 3 skates on the #55 ( I used all 3 on this profile, but only two with the smaller version of it).
First is the skate that’s on the main ...

For the “Shop Made Tool Swap - 2015: Hand Planes and Spokeshaves”, I decided to make two planes (one to keep, one to swap) including the blades. I started with a 1/8” thick 2.5” wide precision ground flat bar of A2 tool steel that I happened to have on hand. After some requests for more information, I decided to start this tutorial blog for making them.
You can buy tool steel pretty cheap from MSC:
O1: http://www.mscdirect.com/browse/tn/Raw-Materials/Flat-Stock...

So the last place I left off, we were making shavings. The plane wasn’t in ideal form, but it was certainly functional.
This won’t be too picture heavy of an update, but I have made some progress.
I reshaped the front of the tote so the blade wouldn’t rest on it.
The before:
The after:
Plenty of room now. I also glued the tote in, and did the final shaping. The back now eases into the plane body on the back instead of how I left it before.
Then it was ti...

Previously, I had run out of time to complete the tail vise on my workbench:
This weekend I finally got the time to remedy that situation. I started off by routing the dog holes in one of the boards, then gluing up the leg vise block. The dog holes are spaced at 3” for versatility.
Then I needed to figure out what to remove for the various pieces of the vise hardware. Some time was spent with the adjustable square to figure out the recess locations. Note: the measureme...

First, for Terry -
Step 1:
Step 2:
Step 3:
Step 4:
Kinda like eating an elephant. A little bit at a time…
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You know how it is when you head into the shop at 9 a.m. thinking you’ve got a fairly simple task to do, should take about an hour and you can move on to the next part of the project? And then you realize you need to take care of a detail before you can do that one thing? But before you take care of the detail you need to take care of somet...

(Inhales deeply)
OK, lets get this going. Warning up front to anyone NOT curious about how one of these goes together you might want to scroll a bit to get to the money shots otherwise hang in there we have a bit to go over first.
First things first here are what I typically use in any tool restoration during assembly. Nearly all of these deal with corrosion prevention in some form or another and that folks is the name of the game from this point on. We just spent a lot of sweat equi...

The layout for the vise end tongue is a bit more involved because you need to factor in your vise screw, traveller and dog block. Unless you can fabricate them yourself after you make the cuts to your benchtop, you pretty much need to have all those pieces in hand at this point.
I assembled my vise screw, flange and traveller. And the dog block.
That’s actually two dog blocks in one piece. I’ll cut that apart when I eventually assemble the vise. Keeping it as a larger piece ...

I have been working on this for a few weeks now, it has been interesting to say the least. Knowing what i know now, i probably wouldn’t do it again, or maybe i would. It was a fun build. I still need to make a donkey ear and miter fence, But i have ideas about those.
It was a relatively cheap project, the most consisting of the slides and brass/aluminum. I had the plywood from some scrap i scored at work for free. I was originally going to just use UHMW, but upon browsing the hardwar...

In a recent tool gloat, dakremer showed off three lovely braces he’d purchased and said “Now I just have to learn how to restore this kind of thing”. WayneC was first to congratulate him and then proceeded to drop me in it (only joking) by saying “Brit has lots of experience in restoring braces”. Later in the comments dakremer said he would love to restore at least one of them to like new condition. Always a sucker for punishment, I agreed to do a blog on restoring a hand brace and I’ve...